I had some money to spare recently, and I decided to buy some good
technical books. Actually I went out to find some great books, and not
so much with an agenda to learn from them but more to be used as
reference for years to come.
First book I settled on was
the Principles
of Network and System Administration by Mark
Burgess. Last edition is from 2003 but this book is still
excellent and unique in many ways. It is one of the only (if not the
only) book approaching the topic of systems administration from a
scientific standpoint, treating it as a branch of engineering. Book on
principles, best practice, ethics, users and management of the
human-computer systems. At times it seems perhaps too academic in its
approach in respect to business environments where something is always
going wrong (Murphy is out to get you) and is often hard to maintain
levels of operation this book advocates. Still it's something every
good sysadmin should aspire to, I enjoyed re-reading it and it's just
the kind of book I had in mind.
It felt kind of karmic that the fourth, 20th year anniversary, edition
of
the Unix
and Linux System Administration Handbook was released these
days. This series of books (previously UNIX and Linux treated
separately) by Evi Nemeth (and others) is well known, and I
just had to buy this edition. It is very much different than the book
above, a 1300 pages volume filled with practical matters including
real world experiences of its authors. The foreword says it is not one
of those "administration" books targeting users who run a UNIX system
in their garage. It's rather oriented towards running UNIX in the
enterprise. This revised edition covers AIX, HP-UX, Solaris,
RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu, and as usual dedicates a large
part of the book to networking. It could be worth to you to know that
it also includes chapters on topics like DNSSEC and
virtualization (being that the 3rd edition was released back in 2000).